Approximately 400 students from around the country gathered at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor this weekend for the Second National Student Conference on the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. The group met to plan strategy for the growing, controversial drive to urge American colleges to sell stocks they hold in companies that do business in Israel, as a means of protesting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The conference has ignited a firestorm of debate on the Michigan campus, and supporters of Israel held counter-protests throughout the weekend.
Comparing their goals to those of college students two decades ago who successfully urged colleges to sell investments with ties to South Africa, before the fall of apartheid, students from more than 70 colleges spent Saturday listening to academics and Arab-American leaders make the case for divestment as a response to what they described as Israel’s extensive human-rights violations.
In formal sessions and informal discussions, student supporters of the Palestinian cause traded ideas about gaining support from student newspapers, minority-student organizations, faculty members, and unions that represent campus workers.
Amenah I. Ibrahim, a Michigan graduate student and an organizer of the divestment conference, said that the movement is growing exponentially and is now “just at the bottom of the curve.” Ms. Ibrahim added, “Even though it’s still mostly Muslim and Arab students here, they’re starting to organize solely for this one particular issue. That’s a huge thing. These aren’t subcommittees anymore. These are whole student organizations.”
The Michigan campus was consumed by controversy in the weeks leading up to the meeting. An anti-Semitic e-mail message was sent to the student body last month. The e-mail address from which the message was sent appeared to be that of a pro-Palestinian student group, but that group said that its e-mail account had been “hijacked” in an attempt to slur the group.
Mary Sue Coleman, the university’s president, stated flatly that Michigan would not divest from companies doing business with Israel.
On Thursday, more than 1,000 students from Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, and other colleges and schools in the Detroit area rallied here in support of Israel. Most of the students wore shirts that read, “Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel.”
Laurence Deitch, a University of Michigan regent, spoke at the event and told the students that the university, in allowing the conference to take place, was not endorsing it. He said that Michigan’s commitment to academic freedom required it to permit the conference, “no matter how objectionable.”
On Friday night, while celebrating the Jewish Sabbath, students at the University of Michigan Hillel fretted, prayed, and planned for the weekend’s events.
Jewish students stood outside of the doors of the Palestinian Solidarity conference all day Saturday holding signs that read, “This conference supports suicide bombing” and “This is an anti-Semitic hate conference.” They chanted phrases such as “Shame for inciting violence” and “Shame for supporting the killing of university students.” Late Sunday, Jewish students who traveled here from Barnard College and Columbia, New York, and Yeshiva Universities planned to “re-enact” the recent bombing at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, by a Palestinian terrorist.
On Sunday, the pro-Israel rallies grew in size from Saturday because scores of students arrived from New York City. More than 200 pro-Israel students held a series of rallies as they moved through the campus.
Police officers were also more visible on Sunday, although interaction between the students from both sides of the divestment issue was minimal, and largely confined to periodic shouting matches.
The divestment movement is “by no means purely a student movement,” said Avi E. Jacobson, a junior at Michigan and a leader of a campus group to back Israel. “It’s very much an international movement that plays on the ignorance -- the emotional ignorance -- of students.” Mr. Jacobson called it a “sinister” movement and characterized the weekend conference as a “publicity stunt” meant to smear Israel and cause “the economic destruction of a democratic state.”
At conference events on Saturday, a controversial tone was set early on.
“Israelis have always wanted Palestinians to be the new niggers of the Middle East, a cheap labor force with a few elites,” said Mahdi Bray, director of the Muslim American Society’s Freedom Foundation. Mr. Bray spoke at a meeting that sought to point out similarities between conditions in Israel and those of apartheid South Africa. Although he acknowledged Israel is a democracy, he said that democracies can be guilty of human-rights abuses, too, noting that the United States had sanctioned the label of black people as “two-thirds human” during the era of slavery.
During a seminar titled “Israel’s Campus Thought Police and the Slur of Anti-Semitism,” Hussein Ibish, communications director for the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, based in Washington, said that “everything short of assassinating people has been done to stop this conference.” Students laughed along with him in response.
Mr. Ibish ran through a laundry list of recent actions he portrayed as anti-Arab, including a speech by Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard University, that cast the divestment movement as having an anti-Semitic impact (see an article from The Chronicle, October 4); the collection on a Web site of “dossiers” on professors who actively criticize Israel (see an article from The Chronicle, October 11); a petition circulated by college presidents calling for a statement against anti-Semitism on campuses (see an article from The Chronicle, October 8); and controversy over a Palestinian activist speaking at colleges in Colorado during the week of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks (see an article from The Chronicle, September 10).
Mr. Ibish said that while tenured professors were unaffected by those actions, the controversies were “chilling the speech of graduate students and junior faculty [members].”
“It’s racist,” Mr. Ibish said. “It’s McCarthyist. Even in a free society -- even on campuses -- criticism of Israel still somehow crosses the line. It cannot be allowed.” He added that academics like Noam Chomsky, a linguistics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have been critical of Israel for decades, have always been subject to “blacklisting.”
Mr. Summers, Mr. Ibish said, comes from a “racist” background that includes work, while a leader of the World Bank in the early 1990s to encourage more companies, including some that pollute, to locate themselves in developing nations. Mr. Summers has long said that his views on the subject have been distorted, and that he was trying to promote economic development in impoverished nations.
Addressing Muslim and Arab students in the crowd, Mr. Ibish lamented that the current cultural obstacles facing pro-Palestinian movements are “our fault” for pursuing careers in engineering and medicine rather than entering journalism, which he contended is run by Jews.
Religious and ethnic identity played a role in most of the students’ motivations for attending, but not exclusively so.
Amer K. Ardati, a third-year medical student at the Ann Arbor campus, is both Arab and Muslim. However, he maintains that those identities do not color his choice to support divestment. “I work towards universal health care, but I don’t do that because I’m a medical student; I do that because I know people in this country are dying needlessly,” he said, adding, “The jump to the conclusion that, just because I’m Arab and Muslim, then I must be for Palestine, precludes thinking that I have a sense of justice. [The conference] isn’t anti-Semitic. Not at all. I’m a Semite. I’m Arab. I am Semitic, as well.”
Some students at the conference were neither Muslim nor Arab. Among them, Sean S. Krebs, a sophomore at Ohio State University who describes himself as “spiritual” but not religious, said he attended the conference because “I’ve come to the realization that I -- as an American -- I have a unique responsibility here. I am paying for some of the killing going on. I think it’s a secular issue, though. It’s not just about Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians. People say, ‘It’s not my cause,’ but it is. It’s an issue of human rights.”
Ora R. Wise, a junior also from Ohio State, is a Jew who helped organize the conference. “We categorically reject the accusations of anti-Semitism that are being tossed around as part of a desperate effort to discredit the movement. As Jews fighting for Palestinian liberation, we are struggling for Jewish emancipation from the reactionary, narrow, uncritical mentalities of those Jews who make it impossible.”
(Pro-Israel students, like Michigan’s Mr. Jacobson, dismissed the inclusion of Jewish students in the pro-divestment movement, calling them “tokens.”)
When asked at a news conference why Israel was being singled out in the divestment campaign -- as opposed to countries such as China, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia that all violate human rights -- Eric L. Reichenberger, a graduate student at Michigan and a spokesman for Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, the chief student group behind the conference, said that Israel is “the prime example of human-rights violators in the world.”
A philosophy professor from Ohio State University, Joseph Levine, said that the criticism implied in the question was baseless. “If you say you can’t target one cause because there are all these others, it’s just a recipe for passivity,” he said, adding that it’s “not an embarrassment” for Jews to target Israel. Mr. Levine, who is Jewish, elaborated: “Look, our aim is to end the occupation. We targeted whatever company will help us achieve that. Don’t tell me that I can’t defend Palestine because of China. That’s absurd.”
Although student leaders at the conference said that the University of Michigan has $151-million directly invested in Israel, or in companies that do business in Israel, they were unable to specify where or how that money is spent. And while divestment supporters talked frequently about investments in Israel, many of the examples they cited are multinational companies whose operations in Israel represent a small fraction of their overall operations.
At another seminar, “Academic Freedom in Political Advocacy,” Snehal A. Shingavi, a graduate student at Berkeley who was punished this past academic year for teaching a class on Palestinian poetry for which he included in the course description that “conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections,” spoke about what he characterized as the Orwellian oversight graduate students at the Berkeley campus now experience. (See an article from The Chronicle, May 13.)
Throughout his controversy, he said, “There was no attempt to think that Palestinians could be complicated and interesting and thoughtful. Palestinians could only be understood in the opposition to Israel.” Mr. Shingavi decried “scandalous witch hunts ... that serve no purpose other than to intimidate academics for saying things that they believe.” (Berkeley officials said they looked into Mr. Shingavi’s course because university rules bar instructors from limiting enrollment for any reason other than lack of academic preparation.)
Joining Mr. Shingavi was Sami Al-Arian, a tenured computer-science professor at the University of South Florida, whom the university is seeking court permission to fire because it says he has ties to terrorist groups -- charges Mr. Al-Arian denies. (See an article from The Chronicle, September 6.) Academics, said Mr. Al-Arian, are too infatuated with the idea of “a clash of civilizations” to honestly embrace the intellectualism of Arab-American professors, whom he described as “the perfect bridge” between Muslim and Western academies.
Asked about his feelings toward Mr. Summers, of Harvard, Mr. Al-Arian offered Mr. Summers an invitation to debate the state of anti-Semitism in the country.
But Mr. Shingavi, visibly frustrated, interrupted. “There’s no clamping down on Larry Summers’ voice anywhere in America,” he said. “That’s what academic freedom means: If you can buy voice because you’re the president of Harvard, then, fine, but a grad student at Berkeley? Sorry. Next time. So, I will not shed one tear for Larry Summers’ free-speech rights, not one tear that his feelings are hurt” by criticism of his comments.